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Mama Agatha

a film by Fadi HindashOnce a week, a group of migrant women in the south of Amsterdam learn how to cycle. Overseeing their two-wheeled journey into society is a community mother who everyone lovingly calls Mama Agatha.Mama Agatha is a heartwarming story about making a home away from home and the liberating feeling of riding a bicycle.
Short documentary · 16′ · 2015 · official website

Produced with support from the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts and the Dutch Film Fund

Mama Agatha

a film by Fadi HindashCinematography: Sanna Mensonides, Nina da Costa; Sound: Susanne Helmer; Music: Niko HafkenscheidMama Agatha runs a bicycle training program for migrant women in Amsterdam. A self-described ‘community mother’, she is a 59-year-old Ghanaian woman with the spirit of a 20-year-old. With the help of her bicycle training assistants, Mama Agatha supervises weekly classes in the colorful Southeast district filled with people from Africa and the Middle East. Over the course of 10 weeks, Mama Agatha trains a group of 15 women from Suriname, Pakistan, Morocco, Somalia and China to ride a bicycle and helps them find their own way into Dutch society.

The course begins in an indoor gymnasium where the women can take a tumble on the padded floor without hurting themselves. Some of them bring along their children who film the adventure on their smartphones and act as translators between their moms and Mama Agatha. Hardly any of these women speak Dutch or English. Over the next few weeks, the women move to an underground parking lot. Some take to the bicycle faster than others. The veiled Muslim women, in particular, find it difficult to cycle, because their long dresses get stuck in the wheels. Others are chaperoned by husbands who refuse to leave their side. Mama Agatha handles these cultural differences with wit and humor, telling one Moroccan man, “she is your wife all day long. For this one hour, she is mine.”